Clapton (26 page)

Shortly before the end of 1987 the phone lady contacted me again, saying she was about to be evicted from her flat and needed money. I can’t remember if she said she was pregnant at this time, but I made the mistake of sending her some cash. It was like opening Pandora’s box. From that day on, for the next few years, she hounded me. It started in the press in the spring of 1988, with photos of her in the Sunday tabloids appearing to be several months pregnant and dreadful headlines calling me every name under the sun. It went on for about a month, until someone, a girl who apparently worked for her, contacted the tabloids to say that it was all a hoax. The photos were taken with pillows, and there was no truth in any of it.

I later learned that she had foisted the same ruse on a couple of other musicians, but no one had taken the bait until yours truly came along, giving truth to the old saying, “There’s one in every crowd.” The papers issued minuscule apologies, but I was badly shaken. There was, after all, the slim chance that she might really be pregnant, and I was very confused about what my responsibilities would be if that were the case. And all this took place in that first few months after I had come out of rehab for the second time. Talk about being thrown into the deep end.

From time to time over the next few years the phone lady would reappear, sometimes on the street, in broad daylight, screaming things like, “You’ll never get away from me,” and for a man who is naturally inclined to fear the opposite sex, this was sometimes more than I could bear. Gradually, though, she faded into the background, until one day I met up with her again in New York. She was with a musician friend of mine, whom she had obviously set up home with. I was gobsmacked. I felt that I ought to straighten him out about who she was and what she was capable of. In the end, I left it alone. They seemed very happy, and it looked pretty normal. I just didn’t have the heart to rock their boat, and maybe he knew about it all anyway.

After coming out of Hazelden, there was work to throw myself back into, beginning with a continuation of a project that had started in January 1986, when I had agreed to play six shows on successive nights at the Royal Albert Hall in London. It was to become a tradition, with the number of gigs increasing each year, until they would peak in 1991 with twenty-four. With a band that included Nathan East and Greg Phillinganes from the
August
sessions, Steve Ferrone and Phil Collins on drums, and the addition of Mark Knopfler on guitar, the performances had gone so well that we decided to try and make it a regular booking.

I had always liked this venue and enjoyed going to see people play there. It’s comfortable, has a great atmosphere, and the management has always made sure that it sounds good. It’s also one of the few places where you can see all of the audience when you’re on stage. You’ve got fans behind you and all around you in boxes, standing up in the Gods and sometimes even in the Stalls. The people at the front are right at your feet, so you really feel like you’re in among the crowd. I remember when the Royal Albert was off-limits to rock music, and somehow the Mothers of Invention managed to get booked there. It was a fantastic show, and for an encore Frank Zappa’s keyboard player, Don Preston, known as “Mother Don,” broke into the hall’s organ keyboard, which was locked behind two glass doors, and played a raucous version of “Louie Louie” that brought the house down.

The best times I had in those early years of sobriety were in the company of my son and his mother. It was the closest that life ever got to being normal for me. Conor was a good-looking boy with blond hair, much the same as mine at the same age, and brown eyes. I’d seen pictures of my Uncle Adrian as a little boy, playing in the Ripley woods with my mother, and he bore a strong resemblance to him. He was a beautiful child with a wonderful, gentle nature who was walking by the time he was a year old.

As soon as he could talk, he used to call me Papa.

But however deeply I loved this little boy, I had no idea where to begin with him, because I was a baby trying to look after a baby. So I just let Lori raise him, which she did brilliantly. She would come and stay with her sister Paula, who also worked for her as her assistant, and occasionally their mother accompanied them, and for a few weeks we would live a very peaceful, family kind of life. I used to watch Conor’s every move, and because I didn’t really know much about how to be a father, I played with him in the way a sibling plays, kicking balls around on the terrace for hours and going for walks in the garden. He also got to know my mother and grandmother, and Roger, too. Anyone who came into contact with him adored him. He was a little angel really, a very divine being.

I
n 1989, I began working on one of my own favorite albums,
Journeyman
. Produced by Russ Titleman, the album contained an interesting mixture of covers and originals, but mainly featured more of Jerry Williams’s material. I really loved his writing. In fact, musically I loved everything about him. He could be a little overwhelming in person, but that was entirely forgivable given the scale of his talent. He was great to work with, a wonderful guy, very funny, very talented, and I knew we would be friends forever. I had a lot of fun working on this album, which featured, among numerous musicians, playing by George Harrison, Cecil and Linda Womack, and Robert Cray. Russ insisted that I do a version of “Hound Dog,” which turned out to be a great idea, and a Ray Charles number, “Hard Times,” but my favorite track was “Old Love,” a Moody Blues song I wrote with Robert Cray and on which we shared the guitar playing equally.

We took the album out on the road in 1990, first in the UK and Europe, then later across the USA. It was during the second half of this tour, at the end of August, that I lost a good friend and a musical hero. Stevie Ray Vaughan was a Texas guitarist and blues player, the younger brother of Jimmie Vaughan, whom I knew pretty well from his group, the Fabulous Thunderbirds. In mid-1986, I had had a call to my office from Jimmie saying that Stevie Ray was in a drying-out clinic in London, and he asked if I would go and see him. I visited Stevie and told him that as someone who had been through all this before, I was there for him if he needed me. We became good friends, and during the following years I saw him play a few times and we occasionally jammed together. At that time I would say he was one of the greatest electric blues guitarists in the world, with a style very reminiscent of Albert King, who was his hero.

On August 26 we were playing at a ski resort in Wisconsin, in a venue called the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, between Milwaukee and Chicago. Stevie Ray opened the show with his band Double Trouble, and watching him on the monitor in my dressing room, I remember thinking, “Man, I’ve got to top the bill after this.” His playing was so fluid. It didn’t seem like he was playing to emulate anybody, it just all came straight from him, seemingly without any effort. It was very inventive, and his singing was great, too.

He really did have it all.

I went on and did my thing, thinking that in the light of someone like Stevie Ray, I was a very eclectic musician, in that I didn’t just play blues, I played ballads, reggae, and all kinds of different styles. “The blues” was in all of the music I performed and in the way I interpreted it. Also on the bill that night were Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, and Stevie Ray’s brother, Jimmie, and at the end of the show we all jammed together, Stevie Ray included, in a fifteen-minute version of the song “Sweet Home Chicago.”

When the show was over, we all hugged good-bye and were rushed off to a series of helicopters that were waiting for us. They were the kind of choppers with big Perspex domes, and as soon as we got in I noticed the pilot using a merchandising T-shirt to clean the windscreen, which was covered in condensation. Outside, a thick wall of fog seemed to hover about ten feet above the ground, and I recall thinking to myself, “This doesn’t look right,” but I didn’t want to say anything in case it promoted fear. After all, the last thing you want on a plane is a crazy person saying, “We’re all going to die,” so I just kept my mouth shut. At that moment, unbeknownst to me, Stevie Ray, who had been due to drive back to Chicago, had found a spare seat on one of the other choppers, along with two of my crew, Nigel Browne and Colin Smythe, and my agent, Bobby Brooks.

All four helicopters took off, flying up into a wall of fog. I remember thinking, “I hate this sort of thing,” and then suddenly we were above the fog and the sky was clear and we could see the stars. It was a short trip back to the hotel, and I went to bed and had a pretty good night’s sleep. About seven in the morning I got a call from Roger to say that Stevie Ray’s helicopter hadn’t come back, and no one yet knew what had happened to it. I went up to his room, where eventually we got the news that it had taken off, turned the wrong way, and flown straight into an artificial ski slope. There were no survivors. Poor Jimmie had to go and identify his brother’s body. The rest of the day was spent deliberating about whether or not we should carry on with the tour or cancel it out of respect. The unanimous decision was to carry on, and though we went ahead and played that night’s show in St. Louis in a state of shock, it was the best tribute to Stevie Ray we could have made.

During the
Journeyman
recording sessions, I was introduced to a pretty young Italian model named Carla, who, by default, would become my next life teacher. Carla was introduced to me by a friend of Lori’s, which in itself was a little odd, and caused a lot of problems for everyone over the next few months. Initially I wasn’t overly interested, but she was clearly a music fan and seemed quite taken with me. I was very flattered because she was only twenty-one and very sexy, with long hair, a remarkable figure, and a young-looking face that was slightly Asian, with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. We began dating, and in a very short time I became obsessed with her.

I was living in New York while I made the record, and it served as a backdrop for our affair, very fast and very romantic. Carla took me to a great restaurant, called Bilboquet, where I met and became friends with the proprietor, Philippe Delgrange. This place was the big hangout for all the rich and fashionable Europeans in New York, and in my naivety, I believed I fit right in. While it was still going strong, the Stones came through town on their
Steel Wheels
tour, and Carla mentioned that she was a fan of theirs and asked me if I would take her to see them. We went to the show, and afterward I took her backstage to meet the guys. I remember saying to Jagger, “Please, Mick, not this one. I think I’m in love.” In the past he had made several unsuccessful passes at Pattie, and I knew Carla would appeal to his eye. For all my pleadings, it was only a matter of days before they started a clandestine affair. In the interim, I went to Africa to play a short tour, starting in Swaziland and going on to Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.

On my return, I visited Carla’s family home in St. Tropez, where I got a fairly chilly reception from Carla, but also got the chance to meet a couple of her previous boyfriends. They seemed like great guys and commiserated with me on my plight, implying that Carla tended to move through men quite quickly, sometimes quite ruthlessly. A short while later, after Carla had stood me up a couple of times, I got a call from the girl who had introduced us, telling me that Carla was definitely seeing Mick and it was serious. I had heard rumors, and now apparently it was true. The obsession gripped me for the rest of that year and took some grizzly turns when I found myself guesting with the Stones on a couple of shows, knowing that she was lurking somewhere in the background.

What did I learn from Carla? Not much at the time, but as time passed, I learned to differentiate between lust and love, and a little bit later between pleasure and happiness. To her credit, once the seduction was complete, she didn’t continue to lead me on, and at no time did she ever really express any deep feelings for me, but in my madness, I was able to convince myself that this was the love of my life. The deception involved in her affair with Jagger drove a deep wedge between me and him, and for a while I found it hard to think of him without malice. Later on, of course, I quietly felt both gratitude and compassion toward him, first for delivering me from certain doom, and second for apparently suffering such prolonged agony in her service.

Prompted by my obsession with Carla and Mick, I began to do some proper recovery work. For a start, it was deemed necessary by my sponsor that a “fourth step” inventory be taken on the subject of my resentment toward them both. The fourth step is generally practiced as an honest review of the past in order to identify the alcoholic’s own contribution to his drinking problems. It can also be applied to specific situations in sobriety, where the lines of responsibility have become confused. It is generally symptomatic that alcoholics believe everything is being done to them, and that they are victims, with no control over their own lives. In terms of their ability to stop drinking, this is undoubtedly true, but in every other respect it can be changed or modified as they take more responsibility.

This is part of what the steps are for. It came as a big surprise to me, therefore, to find out that I needn’t have actually got into the relationship with Carla in the first place. I thought that it was something I had to do, and that I was compelled. What I found, as I worked through step four, was that I had chosen to do it. It was where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I didn’t look at the reality of the situation at all, and with only two years of sobriety under my belt, I had very little notion of what was good for me.

I found a pattern in my behavior that had been repeating itself for years, decades even. Bad choices were my specialty, and if something honest and decent came along, I would shun it or run the other way. It could be argued that my choices reflected the way I saw myself, that I thought I wasn’t worthy of anything decent, so I could only choose partners who would ultimately abandon me, as I was convinced my mother had done, all those years ago.